Student of History Is Making Some

Darby English Joins MoMA as Consulting Curator

The art historian Darby English, who recently joined the painting and sculpture department of the Museum of Modern Art.Credit
Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

Darby English is an uncommonly thoughtful art historian who says that interpreting a work of art is never straightforward. He specializes in African-American art history and deplores the tendency to reduce black art to a vehicle for ready-made arguments about injustice and social uplift. Lest he himself be flattened into a type — an African-American man whose tastes are defined by some presumed community — he requested, only half-jokingly, that this article not be accompanied by artwork by Jacob Lawrence, perhaps the most acclaimed black painter of the 20th century.

“It’s fine,” he said recently, in a voice that suggested it was anything but fine. “In plain truth, I’m a little dumb about the work, because it doesn’t hold me at all. But it’s the uniformly flat-footed and sentimentalist uses of Jacob Lawrence to which I object most strenuously.”

Objection overruled: Mr. English has just been tapped as a consulting curator in the painting and sculpture department of the Museum of Modern Art, which “is looking in a black direction,” as he puts it, and relying on him for guidance. By coincidence, the museum plans to unveil, in 2015, a full presentation of Lawrence’s “Migration” series, a suite of 60 paintings that capture the sorrows of black experience in the advanced language of French modernism, with all that implies about tilting planes and swaths of color.

The show was undertaken before Mr. English arrived at the museum, where he has been asked to broaden its holdings of African-American art and provide “deep contextualization,” he said. He is glad to have nothing to do with the Lawrence show, which will include thematically related films, photographs, books and music. “I actually despise theme shows,” he added. “They have a tendency to reduce artwork to a set of typological affinities.”

Mr. English, 39, comports himself with a critical candor that is not often the most useful tool for professional advancement, especially within top-down institutions. But his influence is expanding every day. In addition to consulting at MoMA, he has a full-time job as the director of the research program at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, in Williamstown, Mass., one of only two major think tanks in this country for art scholars. (The other is at the Getty.)

Photo

"The migration gained in momentum" (1940-1941), by Jacob Lawrence, part of the artist's “Migration” series, which will go on view at MoMA in 2015.Credit
Museum of Modern Art

He is, in other words, a star art historian, which might sound like a contradiction in terms in a country where even President Obama feels comfortable knocking the profession. In January, speaking before workers at a General Electric plant in Wisconsin, Mr. Obama belittled the earning potential of an art-history degree.

Mr. English is more generous in assessing the field. “Art history is a way of actively caring for the objects of our culture,” he said, “and I’d like to think that Obama is generally on board with any enterprise one might describe that way.”

When we met on a Sunday morning recently, Mr. English was dressed casually in a light-blue shirt, a black zippered sweater, and skinny jeans. In conversation, he resists small talk in favor of ruminating on his “looking practice,” as he refers to his career.

Significantly, Mr. English attended grad school in the ’90s, the heyday of identity politics, when fashionable art was constantly decrying the oppression of various minorities. Mr. English, by contrast, is representative of a generational shift away the victimhood-first approach. He likes to say, quoting the autocratic art critic Clement Greenberg, “You should never let a work of art get swallowed up in its category.”

On the other hand, Mr. English has made the work of black artists his category, or rather his official field of expertise. His mission represents a departure for MoMA, which has long been known not only for its radiant masterpieces, but also for spinning a narrative about modern art dominated by the work of white Europeans. Its early infatuation with French Cubism and Surrealism led it to overlook much that was vital in American art, by white and black artists alike. In its 85 years of existence, curators say, the museum has devoted its galleries to a major retrospective of only one African-American artist: the sculptor Martin Puryear, whose work comes out of biomorphic abstraction and eschews overt racial themes.

Mr. English’s appointment raises many opposing questions. While some art historians and critics wonder how MoMA expects to repair its history of oversight with a much-belated, part-time curator, others wonder why Mr. English is needed at all in the supposedly post-racial 21st century. It almost sounds like a light-bulb joke: How many brilliant curators does it take to hang, say, such recent MoMA acquisitions as a Glenn Ligon drawing, or Beauford Delaney’s ”Portrait of Howard Swanson” (1967), a cornflower-yellow, Expressionist-style painting of a cross-eyed man?

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"Self-Portrait at Eleven Years Old" (2004), by Glenn Ligon.Credit
Museum of Modern Art

Ann Temkin, the museum’s chief curator of painting and sculpture, puts it this way: “We have made a number of important acquisitions over the last five years, but still felt the need for specific expertise in that history.”

Her recent additions notwithstanding, the holes in the museum’s collection remain large enough to drive an art-delivery truck through. It is probably telling that MoMA, according to its website, owns 1,218 works by Picasso — and a grand total of two works by Bob Thompson, an African-American figurative painter of whom Mr. English happens to be enamored. “The first thing I want to see at MoMA is an exhibition of Bob Thompson and Fauve painters,” Mr. English said. “His most important statements as an artist are all rendered in color. All of them.”

Not that Mr. English is organizing any shows immediately. His professional life will continue to be consumed by the obligations of academia. Last July, after a decade teaching at the University of Chicago, he returned to Williams College, his alma mater, but continues to live in New York.

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Typically, he makes the three-hour commute to Williamstown on Monday, and returns home on Wednesday. Ms. Temkin is in the process of changing her department’s bi-weekly curatorial meetings from Mondays to Fridays, to accommodate Mr. English’s schedule.

Born in Cleveland in 1974, Mr. English grew up, an only child, in nearby Chagrin Falls, Ohio. His mother was a school superintendent, and his father a hospital administrator. The family lived in a new colonial, faced with brick and aluminum siding.

“Now I have an aesthetic judgment that refuses it,” Mr. English noted, “but at the time it was paradise. I had a basement all to myself. I exercised. I had Martina Navratilova VHS tapes, which I wore out. My milieu growing up was always upper-middle class.”

A teenage aesthete who attended an all-male prep school, he read the poetry of James Merrill and made frequent trips to the Cleveland Museum of Art, where he wound up as an intern. He earned his Ph.D. in visual and cultural studies at the University of Rochester, and his dissertation eventually grew into a book, “How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness” (MIT Press, 2007).

Although ostensibly a study of individual artists — Kara Walker, Glenn Ligon and William Pope.L, among them — the book is also a wholesale critique of African-American art historians, whom Mr. English faults for emphasizing collective identity at the expense of the individual voice. His basic point is one with which most old-school humanists might agree: Art must live by virtue of its aesthetic quality, or it cannot live as art.

Is it possible to focus on black artists without viewing blackness as the subject of their work? Mr. English is hardly the first scholar to explore the conundrum, but as Douglas Crimp, his thesis adviser and a post-structuralist critic, observed, “Darby was the person who brought it to a younger generation.”

These days, Mr. English lives on the Upper East Side with his wife, Sarah Hetherington, 26, a strategy consultant. “Sarah is Jewish,” he volunteered, adding that he feels enormous affection for the faith. On his Twitter home page, in the square reserved for a self-portrait, there is a photograph of an onion bagel loaded with cream cheese and lox. “I think it sort of looks like me,” he said.

Presumably he was making a playful point about the limitations of identity politics. One of his favorite books, he said, is Freud’s “Moses and Monotheism” (1937), which hypothesizes that Moses, the liberator of the Jewish people, was not a Jew but an Egyptian, who derived the radical idea of monotheism from the cult of the Egyptian sun god Aton.

“It’s the book that made many people believe that Freud was a self-hating Jew,” Mr. English observed. “People imply that I am a self-hating black person, for I have so little patience for inherited accounts of what it means to be black. I take a lot of solace and inspiration from people who belong to one cultural formation and who have the courage to turn a very critical eye on that formation.”

Correction: April 13, 2014

An article last Sunday about Darby English, a new consulting curator at the Museum of Modern Art who specializes in African-American art, rendered incorrectly the name of the museum that he works for in Williamstown, Mass. It is the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, not the Francine and Sterling Clark Art Institute.

A version of this article appears in print on April 6, 2014, on Page AR18 of the New York edition with the headline: Student of History Is Making Some. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe